Equal Weights and Measures: What the Supreme Court Got Right in Louisiana v. Callais
The Supreme Court handed down one of its most consequential decisions in decades this week, and the reaction has been predictably loud. Critics are calling it the death of the Voting Rights Act. Supporters are calling it a victory for colorblind equality. As usual, the truth requires more care than either headline allows.
But at its core, the ruling points toward something right, something ancient, and something the church should have been saying all along.
In Louisiana v. Callais, a 6-3 Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that had been drawn specifically to create a second majority-Black district. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito held that because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create that district, no compelling interest justified the state’s use of race in drawing it. The map, the Court concluded, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The dissent, written by Justice Elena Kagan, accused the majority of completing the demolition of the Voting Rights Act. That is a serious charge, and honest observers across the political spectrum are wrestling with what the ruling means in practice. The full consequences will take years to sort out.
What I want to address is the underlying principle, because it matters far more than any single election cycle’s map.
The Oldest Standard for Justice
Leviticus 19:35 forbids unequal weights and measures. Deuteronomy 16:19 commands, “Do not pervert justice or show partiality.” Proverbs 24:23 says simply, “To show partiality in judging is not good.”
This is not a political platform. It is the revealed character of God applied to civic life. Justice, in the biblical framework, operates by a single standard applied without partiality. The rich and poor stand equal before the law. The powerful and the powerless receive the same measure. Race, by this standard, is not a legitimate factor in how the state distributes political power.
Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, defines justice as giving to each what is proportionally due based on relevant criteria. The keyword is relevant. Aristotle understood that treating unequal things equally is itself a form of injustice, but he also understood that using irrelevant criteria, like parentage or tribe, to determine civic standing was the corruption of justice rather than its fulfillment.
The American founders tried, imperfectly, to build a republic on this foundation. “All men are created equal” was not a sociological description of their moment. It was a moral claim about the nature of persons made in the image of God, a claim that the law should treat each citizen as an individual, not as a representative of a group.
Race-Conscious Remedies and Their Contradictions
To be clear about the history: race-conscious electoral districts did not emerge from nowhere. They emerged from a genuine and documented pattern of states manipulating district lines specifically to dilute the political power of Black voters. The original Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a response to real evil, to the systematic exclusion of citizens from the franchise they were constitutionally guaranteed.
I am not dismissing that history. Neither is the Court’s ruling.
What the ruling addresses is whether the remedy of drawing districts by race, once justified as a corrective, can itself become a form of the same disease it was meant to cure. And here the classical tradition has something important to say.
Augustine, meditating on justice in The City of God, warned that disordered remedies can perpetuate the very disorders they claim to address. When we organize political power around racial identity, we do not dissolve racial thinking. We institutionalize it. We train citizens, generation after generation, to see themselves primarily as members of a racial group whose interests are represented by a racially defined representative. This is not the path toward the unity that Mon’nique Duson described so powerfully on a recent episode of Refining Rhetoric: the unity that is possible in Christ, grounded in individual dignity and shared sonship before God the Father.
The question the Court has now forced the country to answer is not “should we ignore racial injustice?” The answer to that question is no, obviously. The question is whether permanent racial categorization in law is the right tool for achieving a society where race no longer determines outcomes. And increasingly, the evidence, from South Africa to our own cities, suggests that it is not.
What Equal Protection Actually Means
The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 to ensure that the equal protection of the laws applied to all citizens regardless of race. Its authors understood they were embedding a principle, not just solving an immediate problem. The principle is individual equality before the law.
For much of the 20th century, the Court honored that principle in one direction: striking down laws that disadvantaged racial minorities. The harder question, which the Court has been circling for decades, is whether the same principle applies when race is used to advantage rather than disadvantage. The logic of equal protection, faithfully applied, says yes. The 14th Amendment does not say “except when the intentions are good.” It says equal protection.
This is not a comfortable conclusion for everyone. But comfort is not the standard. Truth is.
Not the End of the Conversation
The practical effects of this ruling will be contested for years. Critics are right that, combined with the Court’s 2019 decision making partisan gerrymandering unreviewable, Wednesday’s ruling creates conditions where racial manipulation of maps can be laundered through partisan justification. That is a real concern, and it deserves honest engagement, not dismissal.
But the answer to that concern is not to keep race permanently embedded in how we draw political maps. The answer is to pursue what the Founders pointed toward and what Scripture demands: a legal order that sees persons, not categories. Transparent processes. Independent redistricting. Accountability to the actual communities being represented.
The church has a word for this. It is called imago Dei. Every person, regardless of color, carries the image of God. That image is the ground of dignity, of rights, of the equal standing before law that the 14th Amendment tried to codify. When we organize political life around racial categories, we are, however inadvertently, training people to see the image of God through a racialized lens instead of a theological one.
That is the deeper problem no court ruling can fully solve. It requires the church to be the church, to preach the whole counsel of God, to form citizens who see their neighbors as image-bearers first and as members of a racial category never.
The Court has taken a step this week toward a legal order that treats citizens as individuals. The rest of the work belongs to us.
As always, don’t be woke. Be wise.